Area types and floor coverings: why they determine cleaning

Two rooms with the same square metre count can cause very different cleaning efforts. The reason lies in the type of area: floor covering, room type and use determine how quickly and how often cleaning is needed.

Anyone who knows only the square metres cannot calculate the effort, only estimate it. Only the combination of covering, room type and difficulty factors produces the Performance value, that is, the area one person can clean per hour. This article shows how the most important coverings and room types shift the effort. It explains the typical difficulty factors and uses two rooms of the same size to demonstrate how far apart the annual effort can be.

The floor covering makes the difference

A textured covering is cleaned differently from a smooth hard floor, a carpet differently from linoleum. Every covering has its own performance value, i.e. an area that can be cleaned per hour. Without this mapping, every effort estimate remains inaccurate.

Three properties are decisive: the surface structure, because roughness and joints hold dirt and release it more slowly; water compatibility, because parquet and wood may only be cleaned with a barely damp mop and therefore need more work steps; and the type of care, because coated coverings have to be refreshed regularly alongside routine cleaning and deep cleaned at some point.

A smooth covering with few joints can be worked in long runs and therefore reaches the highest values. Ceramic with many joints lies well below that, stairs lower still, because every step is worked individually. Striking is the range within the same covering: by hand and by machine the values can differ several times over. So it is not the covering alone, but the interplay of covering, method and room geometry that determines the effort.

The room type determines interval and method

A sanitary room requires more frequent and thorough cleaning than a rarely used storeroom. A classroom, a gym, an entrance area, each room type brings its own requirements for interval and method.

The Room type has a double effect: it lowers or raises the performance value compared with the pure covering value, because furnishing, sanitary fixtures and layout make the work harder. And it determines the Interval, that is, how often cleaning takes place during the year. The two multiply each other, which is why two rooms with the same covering can produce very different annual hours.

What matters is not the covering alone, but the interplay of covering, method and room geometry. Stairs are the opposite of an open hall: here the covering hardly matters, because the geometry sets the pace.

Difficulty factors: what lowers the performance value further

Covering and room type form the framework. Beyond that, there are difficulty factors that shift the performance value downwards within the range. The four most important:

• Furnishing. Every table, every chair, every shelf unit costs time. An empty room can be cleaned in long runs, a furnished classroom only in short sections with constant manoeuvring. That is why the performance value in the classroom is considerably lower than in the corridor, although both have the same linoleum covering.
• Degree of soiling. A workshop, a kitchen or an entrance in rainy weather needs more work steps than a meeting room. Where soiling is heavy, one pass is no longer enough: sweeping comes first and wiping afterwards.
• Visitor traffic. Areas on which people are moving about during cleaning cannot be worked in one go. In addition, barriers have to be set up and removed again. In care homes and hospitals, this is the dominant factor.
• Accessibility. Cramped rooms, many doors, missing lifts, distant cleaning rooms and locked zones create travel times that are not visible in the area figures. A portfolio spread over three floors needs more time than the same area on a single floor.

Added to this are smaller factors: the room height, where surfaces above head height are cleaned as well; the proportion of glass and doors; safety requirements in plant and laboratory rooms; and the timing, because cleaning outside usage hours progresses faster but costs more. All these factors are recorded in the object and area inventory for each area, so that the calculation takes them into account automatically.

Indoors and outdoors follow their own rules

Outdoor areas differ fundamentally from indoor spaces: they are weather-dependent, seasonal and managed differently. Anyone who also calculates outdoor areas must take these particularities into account.

Outdoor areas have their own area types and their own activities. Instead of floors and sanitary fixtures, it is about hard surfaces, green areas, planting and trees. Instead of cleaning types, it is about care operations that arise seasonally:

• Hard surfaces such as forecourts, paths, car parks and stairs: sweeping, cleaning, removing weeds, clearing and gritting in winter.
• Green areas: Mowing in season, edge trimming, fertilising, watering. Here what counts is not the performance value per cleaning but the number of care operations per season.
• Planting and trees: Pruning, weeding, leaf work. This work is not proportional to area but depends on the number of objects.
• Winter service: depending on location and winters, plannable only as an average over several years, with standby time that arises regardless of actual deployment.

Two points deserve particular attention in the calculation. First, outdoor work is spread unevenly over the year: leaf work in October and November, mowing from April to October, winter service from November to March. The pure annual hours figure conceals these peaks, only the Route and annual planning shows whether staffing is sufficient in the peak months. Second, the outdoor areas belong to Caretaking and not to cleaning. In the example school building, around 2,300 cleaning hours stand against total caretaking of 3,250 hours; the difference of around 950 hours is outdoor areas, plant, ancillary work and administration.

Why clean mapping matters

• Only with covering and room type can the correct performance value be assigned.
• This results in a realistic, transparent effort instead of a rough estimate.
• In quotes, the differentiation makes services fairly comparable.
• Changes can be traced in a targeted way: if a carpet is replaced with linoleum, the effort changes only for this one area.
• Areas with unusually high effort become visible. They are the candidates for a change of interval, method or covering.

The assignment is work, but it only arises once. What matters is getting it right during recording instead of correcting it later. Which information is needed for this and in which order it is best recorded is described in the article area recording for the cleaning calculation. How hours and costs arise from the assigned areas is shown by the Cleaning calculation; which cleaning type accounts for which share is shown in the article Maintenance, deep and interim cleaning.

FAQ

What is the minimum information an area needs?

Four: area in m2, floor covering, room type and interval. That is enough to calculate with. Everything else, degree of furnishing, degree of soiling, visitor traffic, floor, refines the result and determines where within the range the performance value lies.

Do I have to record every room individually?

Not necessarily. Rooms of the same kind can be combined as long as covering, room type and interval are identical, for example 20 identically equipped classrooms as a single item with the total area. As soon as one of these three details differs, a separate item is needed; otherwise the performance value is correct for neither of the two groups.

Which area counts as cleaning area?

The floor area that actually has to be cleaned, not the gross floor area. It does not include walls, shafts, wall cross-sections and areas permanently covered by fixtures. It does include stairs, which are calculated with their developed area, that is, tread plus riser.

How does a change of covering affect the costs?

Often more than expected. If a ceramic covering replaces a linoleum covering, the performance value drops noticeably. The cleaning effort for this area then rises permanently by around a quarter. In a renovation it is therefore worth factoring in the cleaning effort over the entire service life instead of only comparing the purchase price of the covering.

Conclusion

It is not the square metres alone but their nature that determines the cleaning effort. Covering, room type, interval and difficulty factors can lead to three times the annual effort for an identical area. easyCAFM records covering, room type and use for each area and automatically assigns the matching performance values, the basis for a robust calculation and for an Cleaning concept, one that survives changes.